


who cares if one more light goes out in a sky of a million stars (it flickers, flickers)

by lesbianettes



Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canonical Character Death, Coda, Gen, Nancy centric, POV Nancy Gillian, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide Attempt, Trauma, Whump, emeto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:27:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29377776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Nancy can't cope after Tim's death
Kudos: 20





	who cares if one more light goes out in a sky of a million stars (it flickers, flickers)

Nancy has to be dragged away from Tim.

She tries to work on him, save him, do something for him, even if it’s already too late by the time they follow Owen’s scream to Tim’s body, pinned beneath a massive piece of ejecta. Nancy drops to her knees by his side and grabs for it with her gloved hands. When she can’t move it, when her gloves begin to melt into her skin, she peels them off her burned hands and feels frantically for his pulse. 

“Starting compressions,” she cries, getting up on her knees, but she doesn’t know where to put her hands. The ejecta had initially covered Tim’s chest, right where she would do CPR, but has since melted through his body to singe and sink into the dirt. She thinks she might be screaming when she grabs Tim’s scorched face and tries to wake him up.

She cries, she screams, desperate to help him, desperate for someone to do something, until Owen says something and Paul and Judd grab her arms to pull her away. She fights them. Of course she does, because she’s a Goddamn paramedic and she needs to get to Tim to save him, but they’re both holding her back as Marjan and TK move to block her view. There’s tears in their eyes. They have no right to cry when they won’t let her see him, help him. Save him. She has to save him. 

“No!”

Owen stands in front of her so that all she can see is his worn face and blue eyes, not Tim. Not even the people blocking Tim. Just him, and he puts his gloved hands on her shoulders above Judd and Paul’s hands. 

“Nancy,” he says gently, “there’s nothing we can do. We’re going back to the station now, okay? Let Tommy patch up your hands on the way.”

“We can’t leave him!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” he repeats. “Judd, drive the ambulance?”

“Sure thing, Cap.”

Usually Tim drives. Nancy makes an inhuman wail and doubles over, only held up by Paul and Judd’s strong grip, until they carefully lower her to the dirt. She claws at her face in her grief, desperate to feel something, until they seize above her burned wrists and hold her still so she can’t hurt herself anymore. 

“Breathe, Nancy,” Tommy says as she kneels in front of her. She has her medical bag. Did she have that when they came over and found Tim? Why didn’t she help? “It looks like second degree burns, you’ll need to go to the ER, but I’ll get it all cleaned up and bandaged for you.”

“Tim needs to go to the hospital,” Nancy counters. 

No one responds to her.

She stares down at her hands as Paul holds her right still for Tommy to rinse with saline and wrap heavily in cool white gauze until she can’t move her hand at all. Paul steadies her left. She’s been made useless as they guide her to the back of the ambulance, where Tommy helps her onto the gurney and sits beside her as Judd goes to start the engine. Everything is very quiet. Nancy prefers this to fake condolences when they wouldn’t let her see or help Tim, and curls up on her side on the gurney so she doesn’t have to look at Tommy. 

“There was nothing we could do,” Tommy says. 

“I think I’m tired of hearing that.”

They drive for a long while, to the point that Nancy realizes they’re at a clinic and not the station. “It’ll be faster than the ERs,” Judd says when he opens the doors. He and Tommy help Nancy down from the gurney and the truck bay, and lead her into the clinic. They stay with her while she’s seen. She’s given medicated ointment, painkillers, and antibiotics, as well as a fresh dressing on her burned hands. Looking at them, they remind her too much of Tim’s skin and she has to turn away. 

Then they take the ambulance back to the station, where Nancy has to meet with Owen and the department chief and tell them what she saw. What she did. They all stare at the bandages on her hands the whole time. Finally, she’s allowed to go sit with the rest of the crew and hold a pillow to her chest while they talk. 

She says they should have saved him. Worked on him. Helped him. 

“There wasn’t enough of him left to work on,” Judd says sadly. 

She wants to hit him. Instead, she throws the pillow at him and goes to clean out Tim’s locker because no one else will. It’ll be difficult with her hands, but it isn’t as if anyone else will do it. No one really cared about her and Tim except for Michelle, and she’s not here anymore. 

Oh God, Nancy has to tell Michelle. No one else will think to call her. 

She carefully takes down all of Tim’s hoodies, a feat made difficult by her bandaged hands, and cries until Tommy comes to help, and promises to look after Buster. She also offers to drive Nancy home, something which she has no choice but to accept since she can’t drive with her burned hands. She doesn’t want to be comforted. This is something which Tommy seems to sense. There is no radio, no speaking. No nothing. 

When they get to Nancy’s house, she hands over her phone with sad eyes. 

“Can you call Michelle for me? I need to tell her.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Tommy says. 

She helps Nancy out of the car and into the house, fiddling with the keys much slower than Nancy is usually able to do this, and lets her in. 

“Do you need anything else tonight?”

Nancy shakes her head. She wants a shower, but she can’t take one with the bandages like this and refuses to ask for help with that. After a long moment, Tommy leaves. Now, Nancy is completely alone, and she collapses on the floor to sob. 

The next morning, she wakes up to a knock at the door. Nancy fumbles with the lock and the knob for a moment before opening it to see Michelle, red-eyed and somber. “I thought we could both use some company.” In her arms are grocery bags full of ice cream and tequila, so Nancy steps to the side to let her in. 

Michelle eyes the hand shaped bruises on Nancy’s biceps from the restraint, but doesn’t say anything. Instead she sets up two glasses full of tequila and spoons for the ice cream on the couch, with a soft offering of help if Nancy needs it. This feels like breakup protocol, but cold ice cream and hard liquor don’t seem like such a bad idea to soothe the burn inside of Nancy’s chest at the loss. For her, there is no grace period in which it doesn’t seem real. She touched his body. She burned her hands trying to help him. She could not save him.

“Owen tells me they had to pull you away.”

“I had to try and save him.”

“I would’ve done the same.”

Nancy manages to get the glass to her mouth and drains it all in one go. Michelle wordlessly refills it. They will likely get fucked up, and pass out on the couch, but it’s not as though Nancy has anywhere to go. Everyone got a few days off for the grief, and Nancy has a couple weeks while her hands heal. She’s lucky she doesn’t need grafts or it would be longer. Instead, she’ll simply get blisters and pus for a while, and then it’ll turn into scars spanning the entirety of her palms.

“Who’s taking care of Buster?” Michelle asks. 

“The new captain took him in. I think she feels guilty.”

“She should. She lost someone.”

They pretend it’s fair to blame Tommy, because that’s easier than blaming no one, and Michelle starts drinking straight from the tequila bottle. Luckily there’s another, which Nancy begins to do the same from. It burns going down in a new sort of way, but Nancy loves the sting of it and the way her head begins to get too fuzzy to really feel sad anymore. She falls asleep next to Michelle and wakes up alone.

Tim’s funeral comes a week later, when the firefighters of the 126 are out fighting some wildfire. None of them come home to attend. Nancy, whose hands are somewhat healed and require much less thick bandaging, is able to dress herself and pull her hair out of her face before she goes. She wears sensible flats instead of heels because Tim always said she walked like a baby deer in her heels. This is true. She thinks it would honor his memory to stand up straight and serene rather than stumbling and losing her balance like a drunkard. 

The thought reminds her that Michelle has left some alcohol in the house for her, so she hunts down the bright pink bottle of fruity vodka and brings it to her lips. Drinking doesn’t burn as much as it used to, and she downs the equivalent of four shots with ease, licking the remnants off her lips after. It will make the funeral easier to bear. Then she goes out and sits on her front porch, under the bright blue and unfairly sunny sky, and waits for Tommy, who promised to drive her. 

Tim’s family will be at the funeral, Nancy realizes, and the thought terrifies her. They’re going to ask her why she didn’t do more to save him, and she will simply look at her burned hands and shrug because she has no answer. She did all she was able before she was stopped. Part of her knows, rationally, that there was nothing to do; Tim was dead before she got to him, they say, but most of her believes there was something she could have done. Anything, really. She doesn’t believe herself to be blameless in this, and she doesn’t expect others to believe it either. 

“How are you doing?” Tommy asks in that gentle voice that everyone who called Nancy with condolences has used. “Been sleeping okay?”

“Fine.”

Tommy doesn’t comment on her unusually brusque behavior, which is good, because Nancy is too exhausted and hurt to try to put on the niceties and act like she hasn’t been on a small bender between drinking and her painkillers for the last few days. Michelle has been kind enough to stop by a couple more times, so the two of them could grieve together. Unlike the current 126, Michelle will be coming to the funeral. 

When Nancy and Tommy arrive, she gets out of the car and joins Tim’s family. They had asked her to be a pallbearer, and though it broke her heart, she said no. She can’t carry his corpse to the grave. There is a large procession, given the times, and Nancy takes Michelle’s hand while two police cars lead the funeral procession. Four paramedics from another house, people who vaguely knew Tim, carry his casket. Their white masks look so awful compared to the dress blues everyone wears for the occasion. 

Her own feel too itchy and tight without Tim beside her to make a joke, and Michelle leans close to whisper in her ear. She expects reassurance. Instead, Michelle murmurs, “Have you been drinking?”

Nancy doesn’t bother to respond. Of course she’s been drinking. Her best friend is gone, and without him, she doesn’t know how she can ever walk into the firehouse again. She doesn’t know how she can live again. It feels like the past few days, she’s been wading through glue, waiting for some miracle news that Tim is alright. 

He’s not. 

The tears come quietly instead of the loud, ugly sobs she’s suffered through recently. Michelle squeezes her hand. Tommy takes the other and holds on tight. Between the two of them, they attempt to anchor her, but it feels too much like being dragged away, so she lets go and crosses her arms protectively in front of her chest.

Her eyes burn and her cheeks wet her mask while the procession goes on, ending with Tim’s flag being taken off the coffin and handed to his mother so he can be buried. This is it. There is finality in his burial, proof that he will never ever be coming back. The feelings of the past week all hit at once and Nancy’s legs give out. Michelle and Tommy have to hold her up. Though she doesn’t much want to be touched or held in any capacity, she allows them so she can stand through Tim’s funeral, and leans against Michelle when it’s over. 

“Let it out,” Michelle says, and the sobs come once more. They’re the same ugly, desperate things as the night it happened, but no one is cruel enough to accuse her of theatrics. Thank God. She couldn’t handle her pain being questioned right now, she knows, and it’s lucky that Michelle shoos away anyone who comes to ask. She seems to sense how fragile Nancy feels right now. “I’ve got you. It’s going to be alright.”

“No, it’s not! He’s dead!”

Everyone quiets at her shout, and Michelle guides her away from the crowds to grieve in peace, if there is such a thing in a world without Tim. 

It’s another two weeks before Nancy is cleared to return to duty, although part of her wants to just stay home rather than go to a firehouse where Tim no longer works. Still, she puts on her uniform and pulls back her hair to drive herself, something she hasn’t done since she was injured. She needs to go grocery shopping, she thinks, but it doesn’t seem very important in the wake of the past few weeks. 

She’s vaguely hungry when she parks and walks into the firehouse, especially once she smells the pancakes Paul is making and the nice syrup Marjan has cracked open. “We made a little welcome back breakfast,” Mateo explains. He’s dusted with flour. “Pancakes with the good syrup from Cap’s farmer’s market, and powdered sugar, and raspberries, your favorite!”

Raspberries were never her favorite. She ate them voraciously as an inside joke with Tim, who was really the one to like them. Nancy forces a smile and a thanks even though she feels hollow inside. Judd asks if she wants a hug and she says no. His arms will remind her too much of that night, and she can’t afford to break in front of everyone any more than she already has. She’s too sober for this. She can’t drink on the job, though. So instead she sits down with the team for a delicious breakfast that she can tell they poured a lot of love into. 

It tastes like sawdust. 

She eats it anyways though. Judd gives her a second helping, which she carefully picks through to make it look like she has more than she does. They all usually take seconds, sometimes thirds, because of how much energy the job takes. Everyone else certainly has plenty. Tommy gives her a look. Nancy looks back and gets up to scrape her plate into the trash. They don’t put her on dish duty today. 

Marjan follows Nancy to the rec room and sits beside her on the couch. They don’t speak. It’s much easier to be quietly upset than it is to talk about what losing Tim felt like, which Nancy knows everyone will be asking. She completely broke down in front of all of them, and regardless of how rational that may have been, she doesn’t want to contend with trying to relive all the agony when she’s just learning to push it down with lots of alcohol and little sleep.

“Do you have nightmares?” she asks Marjan. 

“Sometimes. They’ve gotten worse since… I dream of him, as I’m sure you do.”

“Every time I close my eyes.”

Marjan nods and holds out her hand. Nancy takes it, only because she doesn’t know what else to do, and revels in the small amount of comfort for as long as Marjan will give it to her. It’s nice to just have something instead of being asked if she’s alright, or instructed to talk about the death of a loved one. Owen wants Nancy to go to a department counselor to talk about it, but she imagines that unleashing the beast will only make things that much worse. She doesn’t want to deal with letting that monster out of its box any more than she already has. 

The two of them stay together in a heavy silence after that until the bell rings, and Nancy rushes to the ambulance in the bay. She goes to hoist herself into the truck, passenger side, and her heart stops. 

Tim isn’t here to drive the ambulance. 

She freezes until Tommy comes up behind her and places a hand on her back. 

“You alright, Gillian?”

“Fine.”

Nancy goes to the other side of the truck and pulls herself into the cabin, having to briefly adjust the seat for her longer legs before she can drive. It feels like erasing Tim from the ambulance. It feels like abandonment. But she does it nonetheless, and ignores the tears that wet her cheeks as she pulls out of the bay to follow the fire trucks. Tommy sits beside her, when there’s no patient in the back of the ambulance, and luckily doesn’t comment on Nancy crying. It hasn’t been long since Tim’s death. She thinks she’s allowed this. 

When they pull up to the call, it’s at a pool, because of course it is. Some little kid slipped and fell, breaking her leg and hitting her head. It’s broad daylight and nowhere near as hot as it was that night, and the pool is a classic neighborhood rather than a rooftop. It’s not the same at all. But it’s close enough that Nancy freezes up completely. All she can think about is Tim’s body next to that kid on a backboard.

“Gillian.”

Nancy shakes her head and goes to kneel beside the patient to help Tommy. The fracture isn’t too bad, but the head injury is bleeding a lot. Head injuries do. Nancy secures a c-collar over the child’s neck and gently feels the injury on the back of the head. 

“Six inch lac,” she reports to Tommy. “Minor swelling.”

She avoids looking at the pool because it hurts to think about. So she focuses on the child, someone she  _ can  _ save, and pushes all her emotions as far down as she possibly can to make this easier. 

They load the child up onto the stretcher and her mother joins Tommy in the back of the ambulance. Once again, Nancy faces the daunting task of sitting in Tim’s seat and doing his job, but much to her surprise and upset, she doesn’t feel it as strongly. That in of itself is a betrayal. Of course she drives, does what she’s supposed to, but it’s too easy in a way that makes her want to throw herself out of the car entirely. 

The rest of the shift is the same, and as it gets easier to get behind the wheel of the ambulance without crying, Nancy hates herself a little bit more. She shouldn’t be forgetting him so soon. She wants to slam her face into the lockers and remember his laugh and think about her best friend as he was alive, not the night he died. All her memories of him are too heavily tainted by the sight of his corpse and it simply isn’t fair. 

She starts drinking more, though she’s careful not to drink before she has to be on shift. It is the only time in which she gets any peace of mind, any quiet to her thoughts. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to ease the pain, and this helps. She doesn’t go out to the bar with the squad, because she knows they’ll notice her drinking too much and mourning Tim’s absence, instead going home to drown her sorrows in solitude. 

She takes a lot of baths, too, and realizes one night when she nearly passes out in the water that she could have died. Such a thought ought to scare her, but instead it brings a strange amount of relief. If she’s dead, she won’t have to be in pain anymore. On a logical level, she recognizes the danger of this feeling, and she wants to tell someone. She wants someone, anyone, even Tommy to see how badly she’s spiraling, but at the same time, she doesn’t want anyone to know until it’s too late to do anything about it. 

That night, she sits on her bed with a bottle of pills and a decanter of whiskey and considers it. This is the coward’s way out, and there is nothing here to make her remember Tim in her last breaths. These few weeks without him have been hell and she just wishes she could tell him one more time how much she loves him and what his friendship meant to her. He was her world at work. Her best friend. Her lifeline. She doesn’t know if she ever told him any of those things, but at least now she’ll get the chance to. 

Nancy makes a plan.

She writes out her suicide note on her computer, double spaced, and prints it out before folding it up and putting it in a sealed envelope. It is short. Most of it is words to Tim she wishes he could read, but some of it is taken up by apologies to her firehouse and a brief explanation of the agony she’s been in for so long. She tucks it into her backpack instead of her cell phone when she goes to work, and irons her slacks an extra time before pulling them on. It will be her final dress, after all. Nancy plasters on a smile and forces herself to just be normal when she gets to the station and everyone says hello.

Paul watches her. She thinks he knows something is wrong, but they aren’t close enough for him to say anything to her. Besides, he reminds her of that night when she looks at his hands and thinks about the way they felt on her arm, pulling her away from Tim.

Instead of sitting down to breakfast with the others, she goes to the bunks and lays down on the bed that used to be Tim’s. It hasn’t been his in weeks, and the other shift uses the same beds as them anyways, but it feels like connection when she lays down on the soft mattress and cracks open two bottles. 

She takes ten pills four times, chasing them each time with vodka snuck in via her backpack. It’ll take time to kill her, but hopefully she can die before a call comes in and someone runs looking for her to get up on the ambulance and come with. She will not drive Tim’s ambulance again. 

Nancy peels back the covers and curls up under them, content to die warm and safe. The pill bottle and the rest of the tequila sit proudly on the nightstand beside her suicide note and she realizes she’s at peace. She doesn’t mind dying. It’s a respite from the pain, but it is also the ending of a book at just the right time. All her storylines are complete. Her life is at its natural conclusion. 

“Hey Nancy, Cap wanted me to-”

She looks at Mateo. He looks at her. He looks at the bottles on the nightstand and the note ready to be read and turns and runs right back out of the room. He’s getting help. She covers her face and sobs. This isn’t fair. They’re going to make her throw up the pills and take her to the hospital, where she’ll be treated whether she likes it or not. 

Tommy comes in with her medical bag, Owen and Mateo flanking her. The others must have been told to stay away. She pulls out her blood pressure cuff and reaches for Nancy’s arm, only for Nancy to pull away and draw her knees up to her chest. Owen picks up the pill bottle and reads out the drug and dosage to Tommy.

“How many did you take?” Tommy asks her. 

“I refuse treatment.”

“She’s a threat to her own safety,” Owen says. “Treat her anyway.”

“I refuse treatment,” Nancy repeats, and scrambles away when Tommy reaches for her again. “Don’t touch me.”

Owen watches her nearly fall off the bed. “Mateo.”

“Captain, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tommy interjects.”

“Got a better one?”

So Tommy nods at Mateo, who grabs her arms and holds her down against the bed. Her heart is pounding. She screams no, tries to throw him off of her, does anything to be able to escape this just as she did the night Judd and Paul held her back, but Mateo is stronger than her and has more leverage. Nancy screams and thrashes the entire time they take her vitals. She cries when they drag her out of the room and to the gurney where she’s strapped down with soft restraints in front of everyone. The weight of their eyes is just as heavy as Mateo’s weight on her body had been. 

Tommy sits in the back of the ambulance with her and stares at her as she takes rapid, panicked breaths. During the drive, Nancy starts to feel dizzy with the pills, and thanks God that she might die before they get to the hospital. She should have slit her wrists, she thinks. It would have been faster. Maybe even successful before she was found. 

“I need you to stay awake, Nancy,” Tommy tells her.

“Fuck off.”

She’d never normally say such a thing to her captain, but she’s angry and ready to die, tied down to a gurney in the back of an ambulance and waiting for the meds to do their job. Nancy purposefully ignores Tommy’s speech about how precious life is and how many people love her, tuning it out in favor of the dull hum at the back of her mind that’s slowly rising. She wants it to overtake her. She’s ready for it. 

Unfortunately, she’s still mostly awake when they arrive at the hospital. She shuts her eyes and tries to calm herself down, fake dead so they leave her alone, but that just earns a doctor rubbing painfully against her sternum to rouse her. 

“Nancy? My name is Dr. Reese, I need you to open your eyes for me.”

Nancy shakes her head, which makes her feel sick. She gags. Her stomach is rebelling against the drugs she took, or maybe they put something in her IV that makes her throw up, because she’s suddenly leaning over a blue bedpan and throwing up bile. 

She’ll survive this attempt.

She’ll try again.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @milkymarjan


End file.
